Gard and Helen were married late in January. Gard’s patience, and
hard-won philosophy, seemed wholly to desert him at the thought of
longer delay.
“One would think,” Helen laughed, as he pleaded with her to set an
earlier day, “that you were afraid I might vanish.”
“I am,” answered Gard. “I always have been, from the minute I saw you
come around the corner of the house that morning, with your tray and
grape-fruit, I’ve been expecting I’d wake up some day and find that this
part of the dream isn’t true.”
Helen’s cheek lingered against the hand which he put out as if to
reassure himself of her presence.
“It is true,” she said, softly, “truer than the other parts, the hard,
cruel parts. _They_ are the things that have vanished, dear.”
“I guess you’re right,” was Gard’s reply. “They were the dream, and this
is the waking-up; the blessed waking-up.”
“Do you know,” he suddenly said, “it was the longest kind of a time—up
in the mountain—before I got over being afraid, just before I’d open my
eyes in the morning?”
“Afraid?”
“Yes. That I might see—might _not_ see—the open.”
“Yes, dear?”
Helen spoke quietly, though it seemed to her as if her suffocating heart
beats must betray to him what she was feeling. Gard had told her of his
escape from the cloudburst; all the incidents of his Robinson Crusoe
life, as she called it, of the coming of the camel; of that wonderful
journey to the glade; of the glade itself; but this he had never spoken
of. She had thought of it as a door in his heart yet closed against her.
Now it was opening, to admit her to his chamber of sorrow.
“I don’t know what kept me alive through those other years,” he
continued. “Sometimes it seems to me there wasn’t much there worth
keeping alive. There wasn’t much got away but a rack of bones, held
together by hate.”
Helen’s hands stole out and found both his as he went on.
“I thought I’d got to get out,” he seemed as if thinking aloud, “I
thought I’d got to get out some day, just to kill Westcott. Then when I
did get away, I hadn’t anything left but the longing to crawl off
somewhere and die. I’m not sorry about that now, though often, in the
mountain, I raged, to think I couldn’t have killed him that night. Then
I learned better. But I feel mighty thankful now, that I never hurt
him.”
“You would never have hurt him,” Helen murmured.
“There were times when I would if I could have got to him,” Gard
replied, “but I got over my hate. Somehow, that kind of thing can’t live
in big, clean places like that I drifted to. The desert’s a hard place,
my girl. It don’t look lovely as this when you’re fighting for life in
it. It’s fierce as a tiger, but there ain’t any hate in it. That’s only
in men, but it’s deadlier than anything the desert’s got.”
“There’s got to be desert, I guess. There was a man in the surveyor’s
gang I was with once, years ago, always said that. He said you take away
the desert and some of the glorious climates on this slope would all be
gone.”
“I’m talking a lot”; he interrupted himself with half a laugh, “but just
once, this thing’s got to be looked at; because it was so black, and I
can’t let you think I wasn’t black with it. It took that, I guess, along
with the rest of it all, to make me see things the way I do now; but I
ain’t asking pity for it. It was a desert place, sure enough, but now
it’s over. I guess I learned some things worth while. Then when I got
out on the big desert, dear, I found God there, same’s I’d believed when
I was a boy, back on the prairie. I shouldn’t wonder if He’d been there
in the jail, too. That’s the truth of it.”
The girl leaned quickly, and gathered both his hands to her lips, love,
thankfulness, and pride in his manhood, all struggling for expression.
Stout old Chaucer’s brave words came to her mind, and she said them
aloud, with lips yet trembling with tenderness.
“And truth thee shall deliver, it is no drede.”
“That sounds like one of your old poets,” he said, “and I guess he may
have been in the desert and learned. ‘There is no drede’,” he repeated,
thoughtfully. “I suppose he means no fear. That’s right.”
He was looking into Helen’s eyes, his two hands closing over hers.
“There is no fear,” he asserted. “There is nothing _to_ fear. Oh,
girl—my girl! With hate gone, and love come in, there’s nothing in the
wide world to fear!”
February was well along when first they saw the glade together. Morgan
Anderson and Gard had organized a company which, later, was to exploit
the mine. Gard had seen to it that Sandy Larch had an interest, and Mrs.
Hallard. Kate Hallard had gone away from Sylvania, but her matters were
in good hands. She had sold her business to Sing Fat, and gone to
California.
“For one thing,” she had said to Helen, when the two had a long talk
together. “I’m goin’ to learn t’ talk decent. I can’t stand it.
Sometimes when I’m sittin’ still, not sayin’ a word, jes’ listenin’ to
you, seems’s if the language I’m thinkin’ in is makin’ a noise, it is so
howlin’ bad.
“Don’t you think I don’t know; ner don’t you b’lieve it don’t make no
difference. It makes a difference inside me. I’m sick of it. Sick of all
’t means to me. I never had a chance to find it out before; but now I
know, an’ I can’t bear it. I’m goin’ t’ learn somethin’, an’ then, so
long’s I always want to work—you couldn’t make a lady o’ the likes o’
me, not if you laid the money on with a trowel,—I’m goin’ to work at
something worth while, an’ if I ain’t too old I’m goin’ to learn to be a
nurse. Anyhow, it’s good-by the eatin’ house fer mine!”
Helen and Gard went with the first outfit of mining-supplies to the
claim. These were taken by wagon to the foot of the mountain, and
thence, up the trail, on the backs of the mules that had pulled them.
Gard had gone for Jinny, bringing her by rail to Yuma, their point of
departure, and she and Helen had become friends forthwith. Together they
led the procession up the ancient wash; for Helen insisted upon walking,
and her saddle horse and Gard’s followed in the rear.
The glade lay in the pleasant afternoon sunshine much as it had done the
day that Gard said good-by to it. A big live-oak branch had fallen
across the ocotilla bed where he had often rested. Helen surveyed the
rude structure with quivering lips, as he pulled the branch away.
Sandy Larch was unloading the animals, piling up the stores, and getting
things into shape, with the help of the three men of the outfit. By the
big fireplace against the rock Wing Chang, who had cast in his fortunes
with the new company, was taking stock of Gard’s culinary apparatus.
“What do you think of it, Chang?” the latter asked, as the cook
investigated the upturned bean-pot.
“Where you catchee him?” the Chinaman demanded, much mystified.
“I made it. Made them all.” Gard waved a hand at the various
fire-blackened clay pots. Chang tapped the bean-kettle with an
investigating knuckle, testing its soundness.
“Him no clacked,” he said, with a grunt. “Mebby you no clacked; mebby so
allee lightee.”
And no further expression of opinion could be won from him.
Helen made a swift round of the place, Gard following, scarcely able to
believe in his own happiness. She inspected the cabin, and cast her vote
for living outside it. The seats and tables that Gard had contrived gave
her great delight, and she rejoiced in the flaming green of the
volunteer crop of oats into which Jinny had already found her wilful
way.
“I dare say your gold-mine’s all right, Gard,” Sandy said, coming up to
survey the oat patch, “but if it shouldn’t be, there’s another one right
on this here plain, if that water was turned acrost it.”
“I vum!” He pulled a head of oats and examined it. “The Palo Verde’s a
howlin’ wilderness,” he avowed, “to what a man could have here.”
Gard laughed as he led Jinny ignominiously out of her green field.
“No reason why you shouldn’t be that man,” said he. “It’s government
land, all ready to be entered upon.”
“If that’s a fact,” was Sandy’s reply, “an’ you ain’t got no intentions
on it, then Sandy Larch, cow-punch, is likely to blossom out as A.
Larch, rancherio. Can’t you see me a swellin’ señor?”
Wing Chang’s bright fire was lighting up the trees and rocks when Helen,
who had been bestowing her belongings inside the cabin, came out with
something in her hands.
“What is this?” she demanded of Gard, still hovering near.
He took the big shell from her and stirred the palo verde thorns about,
his mind a surge of emotions.
“What are those for?” Helen asked, again.
“Why,” he said, at last, “they’re my tally of the days I lived in the
glade.”
She looked at them, in the twilight, her face touched with wonder.
“How many, many there seem to be,” she murmured.
“There ought to be somewhere about seven hundred, I suppose,” was Gard’s
reply. “We don’t need ’em any more. Let’s help along the blaze with
’em.”
She caught his hands, with a little cry of dismay.
“No! No!” cried she, “You must not destroy them! Your record of days;
hard, thorny days.” She covered the thorns with one hand, in a
passionate gesture of protection.
“They were good days,” he answered, trying to comfort her. “I got a lot
of good out of them.”
“But oh, the price you paid!” Tears glistened in her eyes.
They were in the shadow of a big live-oak, and he drew her to him.
“It was sure a _man’s_ price,” he said, looking into her face. “But I
got full value for it.”
The night was far spent when Gard awoke. A late moon rode high in the
heavens, flooding the glade with white light. The familiarity of the
scene bewildered his rousing consciousness. The circling trees, the
murmur of water, the far-seeming faint glow of embers in the great
fireplace, his narrow ocotilla bed with its bear-skin covering: how well
he knew them all! Had he but slept and dreamed, to awaken after all to
the daily round of his accustomed solitude?
He raised himself upon one elbow. On the cot which they had brought for
her, there, within reach of his hand, Helen lay sleeping. A beam of the
white light sifted down through encircling trees and fell across her
face, round which the night wind had fluttered her hair to soft
disorder. Her head was thrown back, her chin nestling in one supporting
palm. The pure, tender outline of brow and cheek thrilled him as he
gazed, his soul touched to awe.
Long, long he looked, worship and wonder stirring the deeps of his
nature. It was no dream; she was there beside him; there was no drede.
He sank back upon his pillow, tears of supreme happiness brimming his
eyes, and yielded him wholly to the quiet and peace of the large place.
THE END.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.